I mentioned my wife bought me a controversial birthday guitar last week, but I wanted to wait a little while to get some use on it before I made a thread. It has been almost a week, and I have had about 12 hours of time to really dig into the technology, and I really like it a lot.
Anyway, the guitar is a FretLight 521 model that my wife scored on sale off of Amazon for 329 bucks on Cyber Monday. She knows that I have wanted to mess with one of these since they came out in the 80's, so she opted to buy it. Anyway, the price was certainly cheap enough. Only vintage white was available at this price, with the others running 399 and up.
I was pretty worried about the guitar as reviews of the previous series of guitars have not been all that great, and that kind of feedback has been echoed here by some of our experienced members. I was pretty worried when I opened the box that the damn thing was going to be a stupid toy.
My fears were unfounded, as the guitar is actually a pretty decent instrument. It feels about the same quality as some of the good Fender squire import line of recent years. I have no idea who made it, or what country it was produced, but you can bet it was China or Indonesia for the price. The fit and finish are really nice, with surprisingly good fretwork, good paint, and a nice tight neck pocket. Looks as good as my MIM Strat.
Hardware seems pretty good and in line with typical import gear. Everything works as it should. Fixed bridge with string through ferrules. The neck is a Stratabond composite plywood birch neck, similar to what Martin started using a few years ago on their low end models. This is an engineered wood and in this case it is a baked wood and used unfinished. It feels like a raw maple neck and is very fast. The neck is similar to a fender modern C, but slightly fatter. Overall a nice, comfortable neck. The fretboard is some type of black plastic. Apparently, they need the plywood neck to accommodate the internal lights, as regular maple isn't rigid enough after they machine out for all the lights and wiring. Body is multi piece alder and seems to be pretty much a strat clone. Pickguard is a MOTO three layer unit. Pickups are pretty hot and sound like you would expect. I'm guessing they are some cheap ceramic pickups, but they sound OK. Guitar has amazing sustain and is surprisingly resonant. I wonder if the oddball plywood neck has something to do with this.
Out of the box the guitar was not a great player. Setup was pretty much nonexistent. It is like they put together the pieces, added strings, and shipped it. Nut was cut fine, but the string height and neck relief was way off normal. Oddly, the intonation was perfect. Anyway, I took off the shitty strings (10's) and put on a new set of 9's and set the string height and neck relief. The strings that were on there were pretty much full length strings wound on the posts, no trimming, which was a pretty odd thing. Anyway, after a proper setup, the guitar plays really well. I bet the lack of setup has a lot to do with the crappy reviews for these things, but with about 30 minutes of effort I made it play pretty darn well. Plays like one would guess a 200 dollar import guitar would play.
Here are some pics of the main reason anyone buys one of these things.
First the guitar....
Close up of the neck. Looks like ebony (but feels like plastic). No lights are visible when the guitar isn't plugged into a computer.
And a shot of the front where you can really see the plywood neck stuff.
Here is how it looks all lit up. You can show any scale, chord, arpeggio, interval, etc anywhere on the neck in any key, and you can make the roots blink.
Lights are super bright and the neck doesn't get hot when it is on for a while (which I have heard a lot on line). I spent about 3 hours with it and didn't notice any temperature change.
He is one of the many interface screens. You can pick virtually anything you want to see on the lights.
And, then the map on the bottom shows the notes and the roots, tis corresponds to the lights on the guitar, and the roots blink. Kind of fun to find new licks with this mode.
You can also jam to MIDI type loops in any key and pick scales to play along. Also a cool way to find licks.
Here is a loop player that gives you a casio keyboard quality jam track, and here is the guitar showing the G phrygian scale on the neck.
It also works with Guitar Pro 6, so you can plug any tab file into it and it will show you how to play songs (at any speed). It also has a video lesson DVD set that teaches you guitar, but it seems to be geared to beginners and intermediate players. I checked out the lessons just so I could review them, and they are pretty nice quality and teach conventional CAGED type guitar theory based stuff. I'm sure some people might get into them.
So, in a nut shell, I like this thing. It plays pretty well, and seems like an incredible tool to explore more exotic scales and come up with phrases and licks. I had a blast with it the last week, and I haven't played this much guitar in a long time. I think I might have actually learned a few things, which kind of tells me it is working. Sure, stickers could do the same job, or maybe just a sheet of paper with a picture of the neck, but this thing actually makes it fun, and there is less looking at a book and more playing.
Anyway, the guitar is a FretLight 521 model that my wife scored on sale off of Amazon for 329 bucks on Cyber Monday. She knows that I have wanted to mess with one of these since they came out in the 80's, so she opted to buy it. Anyway, the price was certainly cheap enough. Only vintage white was available at this price, with the others running 399 and up.
I was pretty worried about the guitar as reviews of the previous series of guitars have not been all that great, and that kind of feedback has been echoed here by some of our experienced members. I was pretty worried when I opened the box that the damn thing was going to be a stupid toy.
My fears were unfounded, as the guitar is actually a pretty decent instrument. It feels about the same quality as some of the good Fender squire import line of recent years. I have no idea who made it, or what country it was produced, but you can bet it was China or Indonesia for the price. The fit and finish are really nice, with surprisingly good fretwork, good paint, and a nice tight neck pocket. Looks as good as my MIM Strat.
Hardware seems pretty good and in line with typical import gear. Everything works as it should. Fixed bridge with string through ferrules. The neck is a Stratabond composite plywood birch neck, similar to what Martin started using a few years ago on their low end models. This is an engineered wood and in this case it is a baked wood and used unfinished. It feels like a raw maple neck and is very fast. The neck is similar to a fender modern C, but slightly fatter. Overall a nice, comfortable neck. The fretboard is some type of black plastic. Apparently, they need the plywood neck to accommodate the internal lights, as regular maple isn't rigid enough after they machine out for all the lights and wiring. Body is multi piece alder and seems to be pretty much a strat clone. Pickguard is a MOTO three layer unit. Pickups are pretty hot and sound like you would expect. I'm guessing they are some cheap ceramic pickups, but they sound OK. Guitar has amazing sustain and is surprisingly resonant. I wonder if the oddball plywood neck has something to do with this.
Out of the box the guitar was not a great player. Setup was pretty much nonexistent. It is like they put together the pieces, added strings, and shipped it. Nut was cut fine, but the string height and neck relief was way off normal. Oddly, the intonation was perfect. Anyway, I took off the shitty strings (10's) and put on a new set of 9's and set the string height and neck relief. The strings that were on there were pretty much full length strings wound on the posts, no trimming, which was a pretty odd thing. Anyway, after a proper setup, the guitar plays really well. I bet the lack of setup has a lot to do with the crappy reviews for these things, but with about 30 minutes of effort I made it play pretty darn well. Plays like one would guess a 200 dollar import guitar would play.
Here are some pics of the main reason anyone buys one of these things.
First the guitar....
Close up of the neck. Looks like ebony (but feels like plastic). No lights are visible when the guitar isn't plugged into a computer.
And a shot of the front where you can really see the plywood neck stuff.
Here is how it looks all lit up. You can show any scale, chord, arpeggio, interval, etc anywhere on the neck in any key, and you can make the roots blink.
Lights are super bright and the neck doesn't get hot when it is on for a while (which I have heard a lot on line). I spent about 3 hours with it and didn't notice any temperature change.
He is one of the many interface screens. You can pick virtually anything you want to see on the lights.
And, then the map on the bottom shows the notes and the roots, tis corresponds to the lights on the guitar, and the roots blink. Kind of fun to find new licks with this mode.
You can also jam to MIDI type loops in any key and pick scales to play along. Also a cool way to find licks.
Here is a loop player that gives you a casio keyboard quality jam track, and here is the guitar showing the G phrygian scale on the neck.
It also works with Guitar Pro 6, so you can plug any tab file into it and it will show you how to play songs (at any speed). It also has a video lesson DVD set that teaches you guitar, but it seems to be geared to beginners and intermediate players. I checked out the lessons just so I could review them, and they are pretty nice quality and teach conventional CAGED type guitar theory based stuff. I'm sure some people might get into them.
So, in a nut shell, I like this thing. It plays pretty well, and seems like an incredible tool to explore more exotic scales and come up with phrases and licks. I had a blast with it the last week, and I haven't played this much guitar in a long time. I think I might have actually learned a few things, which kind of tells me it is working. Sure, stickers could do the same job, or maybe just a sheet of paper with a picture of the neck, but this thing actually makes it fun, and there is less looking at a book and more playing.
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